I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti Read online

  Not that he refrained from habitually marveling over what a thing it was that we met. “You can’t call it fate, but chance,” he would say, taking me in his arms. I’d point out two tiny prep bowls I’d picked up for ten cents each at Fishs Eddy on my way home from the dentist, items I considered to be major players in that event. “If I hadn’t stopped to buy these bowls, it would never have happened,” I’d say, floored by the idea that my future had been determined by two ten-cent prep bowls. Ah, those little bowls. I get a bit sad when I look at them now, but I haven’t gotten rid of them; they are essential to my mise en place.

  Earlier that summer, during the five minutes I wallowed in disappointment over the utter uselessness of my latest fling, I went to visit my friend Jennifer Romanello on Long Island. Jennifer shares a beach cabana with her extended family, all fabulous cooks staunchly dedicated to eating and drinking well. From a tiny hot plate, they create incredibly sophisticated dishes, risotto and porcini, linguine with crabmeat. One I took particular note of was a stew of colorful sautéed peppers made by Jennifer’s sister Carmela. I marveled at her skillful hand on the paring knife as she cut up peppers along with red onion and tomato and let them slip into the pot. I re-created this dish for Lachlan with gorgeous peppers from the farmer’s market.

  Carmela Romanello’s Sautéed Summer Peppers

  2 tablespoons olive oil

  I clove garlic, minced

  1 red onion, ends removed, sliced lengthwise into semicircular chunks

  Pinch dried oregano

  3 bell peppers (1 red, 1 orange, 1 yellow), cored, seeds and pith removed, cut into strips

  1¼ teaspoons salt

  1 large tomato (or 2 plum tomatoes), seeded and cut into chunks

  ¼ cup torn basil leaves

  Freshly ground pepper

  Heat olive oil in large sauté pan or Dutch oven over medium heat and sauté garlic and onion with the oregano until the onion is soft and translucent, about 3 to 5 minutes. Add peppers and 1 teaspoon salt and cook partially covered, stirring occasionally, for 15 to 20 minutes. Add tomatoes and ¼ teaspoon salt; continue to cook another 10 to 15 minutes until the peppers are very soft. Test for seasoning and serve with torn basil leaves and freshly ground pepper.

  Serve with Italian sausages, barbecued if you’re lucky enough to have outdoor space. I am not, so I grill them on the stove.

  Yield: 6 servings.

  I took Lachlan to Bay Ridge, where I showed him the house I grew up in and my favorite butcher shop, Faicco. I bought us heaps of food—steaks, sausages, bacon, cheese. I love the sight of the gorgeous meat laid out neatly behind the refrigerated glass. I like giving the guy behind the counter my big order, like a signora from days gone by. The dishes I made for Lachlan were simple, but the way he reacted to them, you would have thought I was Luciano Pavarotti’s personal chef. A particular revelation for Lachlan was orzo, a pasta shaped like rice he had never before tried. It makes a great summer side dish, as it’s delicious warm or cool. I made this one with steaks grilled on the stove and seasoned with a little olive oil and salt and pepper.

  Orzo with Cherry Tomatoes and Basil

  ½ cup orzo

  1 tablespoon olive oil

  1 cup cherry tomatoes (a mix of red and yellow if the latter are available), halved

  ¼ cup thinly sliced fresh basil

  2 tablespoons pine nuts, toasted

  1 teaspoon red wine vinegar

  Salt and pepper to taste

  Cook the orzo according to the directions for pasta here. Note: Orzo cooks quicker than regular pastas, so check it earlier than you normally would; 6 minutes seems reasonable to me. Drain the pasta and add the oil. Once it is cooled, stir in the tomatoes, basil, pine nuts, vinegar, and salt and pepper to taste.

  Yield: 2 servings.

  Lachlan continued with his questions over the sausage and peppers and the steak and orzo. He asked them on walks through the rain to the museum and on sunny days lying in Prospect Park. I continued my campaign to evade.

  “Why is it necessary for me to share all that?” I asked.

  “Well, if we were to get married, I would want to know.”

  Those were the magic words. I revealed highlights from just about every chapter in this book.

  When I inquired about his brushes with marriage, I got vague answers:

  “You can imagine that at my age, I’ve come close to getting married.”

  For Lachlan, the one who got away was Claire. He lived with her in London in the late 1980s, and their alleged roller coaster banged on its tracks until the mid-1990s. As Lachlan tells it, Claire was depressed. When she took her meds she was wonderful; when she didn’t she alternated between flinging herself at him and sending him away. They broke up and got back together many times in those years in which they shared a single bed in a London studio that Lachlan would sporadically leave for Italian mattresses. They could never see each other without “ending up in bed together,” he told me.

  The line gave me pause—our sex life had slowed down considerably since he’d moved in. I told him it hurt me to hear about Claire, in light of the near halt. “How old was I then?” Lachlan replied by way of explanation. True, that was many years ago, but he was hardly in the Viagra demographic, and we had only gotten started.

  It was distressing to learn that what Lachlan really liked to do in bed was sleep. He was a champion napper, constantly tired. After a good ten-to-twelve-hour night of rest, he’d be ready for a lie-down shortly after breakfast. I’m awfully fond of sleep myself and have found it nearly impossible to get out of bed every morning of my entire life, but once I’m up, I’m up for the day. I hardly ever nap, and whenever I do, I find it so trying to wake up again that it’s just not worth it. While Lachlan took his pennichella (as he called it), I reclined on the living room sofa, reading his novel, now ready for my eyes. His cleverly titled book was about a rhinoceros that turns into a human being and slips unnoticed into a group of Englishmen on safari in South Africa. (Okay, every detail of that description has been changed so as not to reveal Lachlan’s identity, but what I’ve written conveys the spirit of the work. It was experimental literature.) When he awoke, he wanted to know exactly where I was in the manuscript. I would point out the page, and he would grab it out of my hands and start reading it aloud, laughing hysterically. I laughed neither as hard nor as often as he did.

  The novel waswitty and inventive, a riot of language completely devoid of any genuine situation or emotion. I found it to be as accomplished as many I had worked on in my career, if not better than most of them. It deserved to be published, but I could see where it needed a tweak or two. It wasn’t quite ready, but it had the potential to be a book I might show to an agent without shame. Lachlan would have to work on it while he was in Italy, which is where he was headed next. His first stop was the home of his friend Ruth in the mountains near the Swiss border. Ruth, who was Irish, used to teach English with Lachlan in Rome, then she married an Italian widower who whisked her away to the Alps. Lachlan reckoned he could stay with them for a few weeks; he didn’t know where he was going from there. His intention was to sort out his books and other possessions that were scattered throughout Italy in basements and attics of other British females who once taught English and married Italians. (Why hadn’t I thought of that?) Along the way, he would see if there was an Italian city where he might consider building a bookshelf of his own.

  “Maybe I should come and live in New York,” he would say every other day. That was my wish, but I dared not say it. I dreaded his departure, and he appeared reluctant about it, too. He took lots of pictures of my apartment building. “I feel like this is my home,” he’d say.

  We brainstormed about what kind of work he could do here. I offered to introduce him to magazine editors; he suggested we open a restaurant together. But the conversation was always dampened by the reality of immigration and visa issues. Two of my colleagues at Harper’swere foreigners working in the States under a provision
known as “extraordinary alien status.”

  “You could apply for ‘extraordinarily sleepy alien’ status,” I proffered as we considered the options. I always liked the extraterrestrial ring of the term and was delighted to be able to adapt it to Lachlan’s particular proclivity. In my attempt to promote the United States as a home for Lachlan, I made this all-American dish: crab cakes that I served on a bed of mashed potatoes and corn.

  Maryland Colony Crab Cakes

  (Adapted from Bon Appétit magazine)

  2 tablespoons celery, minced

  2 tablespoons scallions, green parts only, minced

  2 tablespoons mayonnaise

  1 egg

  1½ teaspoons dijon mustard

  ¼ teaspoon salt

  1/8 teaspoon cayenne pepper

  ½ pound crabmeat

  1½ cups panko (or bread crumbs, which are more American, I suppose, but not as good)

  1 tablespoon olive oil

  1 tablespoon butter

  1 lemon, cut into wedges

  In a medium bowl, mix together all but the last two ingredients. Shape into 4 small or 2 large patties, according to your mood and spirit of abundance. Refrigerate, covered with plastic wrap, for at least 1 hour.

  Over medium heat, fry in olive oil and butter until browned, about 4 minutes per side. Serve with lemon wedges.

  Yield: 4 small or 2 large crab cakes.

  To continue my public relations campaign, I took him to Philadelphia, birthplace of liberty, a city I know well because my sister Nancy went to college and graduate school there and I used to visit her often. The Philadelphia Museum of Art is one of my favorites, and I wanted to show it to Lachlan. He swooned at the Chardins and topped my connoisseurship of Italian Renaissance art as we toured the galleries hand in hand. When I took him to see Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell, he shook his fists and launched into an amusing tirade about the Founding Fathers being a bunch of tax evaders.

  All seemed to be going well with project make-an- American-out-of-Lachlan, then he’d get some notion in his head that would send me into the dumps. “The one thing that holds me back from living here is that there could be a terrorist attack” was one of them.

  In addition to Lachlan vacillating about New York as a possible home, we had other customs that developed over the course of those twenty-four days (not that I counted). After Lachlan’s nap came coffee and Häagen-Dazs ice cream. We tried every flavor from sticky toffee pudding (good), to banana split (excellent), to caramel cone (out of this world, especially if you were lucky and got lots of cone bits). It rained often, and Lachlan didn’t much like leaving the house anyway, so we watched Da Ali G Show together. Lachlan had never heard of Sacha Baron Cohen, but once exposed, he couldn’t get enough. He affectionately referred to the show as Dude. “Should we watch another Dude?” he’d say. Borat was his favorite character. It was nearly impossible to get Lachlan out of the apartment between napping and Dude. At times I came down with cabin fever and insisted we go for a walk. Lachlan would come along, holding my hand all the way, thanking me for forcing him to go outside. Then he’d crawl into bed immediately upon our return, worn out from the exertion.

  Still, for a very tired person, he managed to fit a lot into those days. Lachlan was up for any new situation or person that might stimulate his literary imagination. He carried index cards to take notes for his fiction and brought them along to the bris for Jen and Jeff’s baby, Benjamin, who was born a few days after we met. He dragged himself out of bed at seven a.m. for that one and even mustered enough energy to help drag the many gifts from the temple to the car in the pouring rain. “Invite me to the wedding, I give good presents,” said Jeff’s mother, Estelle. Was it that obvious we were made for each other? We took the subway to Coney Island and the car through the Bronx (which Lachlan found insufficiently threatening). He was up for anything, really, except for sex—with me, at least.

  And yet reproduction was very much on his mind.

  “We’re going to have to be getting on with it if we want to have children, we’re both getting old,” he said, mulling over the topic of babies on a Sunday stroll.

  “Why don’t you stay here and we can try to have them together?” I replied, assuming that was what he was getting at.

  Lachlan stopped and hugged me. “Chi sa?” he said. (“Who knows?”)

  (I was encouraged. This was more than I ever got from Ethan on the subject.)

  “But I need to make money,” Lachan said.

  “We’re working on that… . Little Lorenzo Melucci Martyn,” I fantasized aloud.

  “Would there be a British school we could send him to?”

  “Of course, New York has every kind of school.”

  I had no idea if there was a British school. What would be the point of such a place, anyway, since Brits speak more or less the same language as most Americans—to teach the little kiddies that the country they inhabited was founded by tax evaders?

  As much as Lachlan’s musings stymied me, they fed my fantasies in those weeks. I could only presume that he was questioning his own path because his love for me had pushed him to rethink his future. Never mind the fact that at forty-six years of age, Lachlan didn’t have a home, had never stayed in one place for any significant length of time, and had never committed to a woman. Everybody has to grow up at some point. I had some growing up to do myself. “I can’t go on like this forever, and neither can you,” he’d say. Why would I not take such assertions to mean that he was ready for a shared life in my Park Slope one-bedroom? That Lachlan’s desperation to be published came from a yearning for a more serious life. I was convinced that we had met to move into the next phase together. I would help him with his career, and he would help me with that marriage and children stuff I was having so much trouble with. Destiny.

  I got blue as Lachlan’s departure date neared. I’d cry and he would tell me that there was no reason to feel sad. “It’s so amazing that we found each other. We’ve both found a friend, possibly for life.” I was only slightly put off by his use of the word friend, choosing to see it as something positive—after all, one’s husband should also be one’s best friend. But if Lachlan wasn’t returning, the meeting was no cause for celebration, at least for me.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if I came back,” he said as he walked out the door of my apartment for what could have been the last time.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised, either,” I replied.

  “Then again, there’s no point in me coming back if neither of us is surprised.”

  We arrived at the airport with time to spare thanks to Lachlan’s fear of flying and the driving rain. We sat and had coffee at a little espresso bar in a corner of Newark Airport, where Lachlan sat beside me with his arm around my shoulder, staring into my eyes. This resembled the look of love to me, but Lachlan never used that word. “I love you” slipped out of my mouth as we said our final good-bye at the security line. I didn’t mean to say it; the words just came out in a tiny voice he may not even have heard.

  That night I curled up with Lachlan’s first novel, which I had ordered via amazon.uk from a bookstore in Campbelltown, Argyll, the day after I met him. I didn’t tell Lachlan I’d bought it, and he didn’t tell me he’d spotted it on my shelf and signed it, “With love from the plageat Coney Island.” The novel was a stream-of-consciousness affair, pretty incomprehensible, and though many of the sentences were dazzling and others rip-roaringly funny, I could barely understand the words that composed them and had to bring both volumes of the Shorter Oxford into bed with me, too—and not all of them were in there! I needed all twenty volumes of The Oxford English Dictionary, books I do not own and that would have made the bed too crowded anyway. Apparently, my boyfriend was a convoluted genius.

  “I can’t say I’m over my jet lag,” read his first e-mail transmitted from a dial-up on an Italian mountaintop, “but I am filled with such happy memories.”

  Ardent messages signed “LOVE” and “XXXX”
arrived from Lachlan almost daily in the suspenseful weeks that followed. They informed me that I was on his mind all the time—or at least when he wasn’t thinking about his book—he imagined me at the farmer’s market on Saturday mornings; riding over the Manhattan Bridge on the B train as the sun set on my way home from work; or, at night, covered in Häagen-Dazs ice cream (?). “Bed times and meal times are not the same without you,” he wrote. Whatever sentiment he transmitted, I’d multiply by ten and return to him.

  For the most part, I was enjoying this particular cliff-hanger. “If he comes back and we get married, I will remember this as the happiest time of my life,” I’d say to Ginia. This was an ideal situation for me—to be alone in my beautiful home, the prospect of forever love making its way down the Italian peninsula and not through my refrigerator.

  It was my first dinner party season in my new place. I entertained nearly every week. One of the most memorable evenings that fall was a mozzarella competition I thought up with my friend Jesse, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal. Jesse and his wife, Nell, who is a writer, lived next door and we often ran into each other at the farmer’s market. We talked about putting on this challenge for months and finally got it together just in time to pair the cheese with the last tomatoes of summer.

  There is nothing that compares with the tangy flavor of mozzarella made with buffalo milk; the finest examples come from where my relatives live in the southern Italian region of Campania. That cheese is imported to the States, but by the time it gets off the plane, it’s already way past its prime. Mozzarella dies under refrigeration. It has to be eaten the day it’s made; thus, it is better to make do with inferior cow’s-milk mozzarella made locally by hand than waste money on the imported kind. In the New York neighborhoods that were once Italian-American ghettos, there are plenty of such cheeses to try. Each of my guests took a section of town—Bensonhurst, Little Italy, Greenwich Village, and Carroll Gardens—and scanned the latticini that still thrive with the onslaught of the young, wealthy food enthusiasts who have moved to these enclaves. We did a blind tasting, picked a winner, then went on to eat more courses. I made Lachlan’s rigatoni and eggplantand roasted loin of pork seasoned with rosemary. We had cannoli from a bakery in Dyker Heights for dessert. Everyone got to take home some cheese, even after we’d disposed of the losers. I had a freezer full of mozzarella for months. (The frozen cheese is fine to use for melting in a lasagna, parmigiana, or baked ziti.)